


aegrescit medendo

by jouissant



Category: Rome (TV 2005)
Genre: Bedside Vigils, Canon-Typical Violence, Choking, Illnesses, Implied/Referenced Incest, M/M, Period Typical Attitudes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:01:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28145793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jouissant/pseuds/jouissant
Summary: The day the scouts sight Brutus and Cassius’ troops, Octavian wakes to fever and aching joints.
Relationships: Julius Caesar/Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus | Emperor Augustus, Mark Antony/Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus | Emperor Augustus
Comments: 4
Kudos: 19
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	aegrescit medendo

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skazka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skazka/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, skazka! I really hope you enjoy this story. 
> 
> I have played a bit fast and loose with show canon vs. history here, particularly regarding timelines, because the show's is frankly a glorious mess. Please forgive me any glaring inaccuracies.

The day the scouts sight Brutus and Cassius’ troops, Octavian wakes to fever and aching joints. He’s embarrassed to admit he is surprised, for the air in Macedonia has agreed with him; October here is dry and hot, an improvement over Rome’s sopping autumns. His lungs are sound and clear indeed; it is his head that pounds, his hips and knees that feel as though they are filled with glass. He sweats and retches, and needs no mirror to know how pallid he looks, how ghostly. 

“Antony can muster the men,” he says when Agrippa reports. 

“They’ll want to see you, sir.” 

Octavian shakes his head, swallowing past a glut of sour spit. There is nothing for it. He has not yet made it out of bed, and cannot even stand for the slave to dress him. There’s no way he will manage to mount a horse. 

“They can see their generals. Or you may rub some dust in Maecenas’ hair and send him out in my stead.” 

“Maecenas has a worse seat than you,” Agrippa says. “The men would not be fooled.” 

Octavian groans. He lifts a hand from the cot, waves it until Agrippa gets the message and crosses the tent to his bedside. He does not wish Agrippa luck; by the expression on his face he finds the handclasp disconcerting enough. Octavian did not miss the way he looked at his hand before taking hold of it: as though approaching a slain serpent, unsure whether or not it is quite dead. 

When Agrippa leaves Octavian lets himself fall back onto the cot. He wishes he could say he regrets his incapacitation. He already knows he is not the sort of man who can ride out in spite of it; his sickness has always wracked his body as completely as a storm, leaving him no choice but to give over. He lies in his tent and listens to the blaring horns grow fainter across the plain as the legion leaves him in its wake. He does not feel regret at their advance, and he has shut his eyes and willed himself to sleep before he can consider whether or not he feels relief.

* * *

Octavian’s earliest memories are of the sickbed. Of a doctor’s cool hands against his back, flitting between his winged shoulder blades, of probing fingers tapping along his sternum and his ribs. The light in his childhood room was always jaundiced; looking back he does not know if his mother actually appointed the room in yellows, or if illness itself fixed a film over his eyes. But in his memories the room is always yellow, as golden piss, the lemony tinge to his skin, the medicines the doctors show his mother.

“My rabbit,” she coos, and runs her fingers through his hair. 

On the doctors’ recommendation she calls a kitchen slave to stand beside the bed. She is pregnant and swaybacked with the weight of her swollen belly. She lowers her dress to reveal one breast, huge as a moon and blue-veined, and as he watches as she takes hold of it and squeezes. 

“Open your mouth, Octavian,” his mother says. 

He doesn’t want to; he turns head away into the pillow, and when his mother takes him by the chin he thrashes against her like a horse against the bit. “Open,” she says again, and when he disobeys she sighs and slaps him. In the ensuing shock he lets his mouth fall open. His mother grabs him, her nails sharp in the meat of his cheek. 

“Do it now,” she says.

The slave shakes to be so close to her mistress, but she draws nearer anyway. She drapes her great body over him. Octavian smells her rank sweat and a peculiar sweetness where the milk has seeped from her body and dried on her skin and clothes. He wonders, could she smother him? Could she lie atop him and cover his face with the round cheese of her teat? He is weak and would be no match for it. He shuts his eyes and keeps his mouth wide open. 

Colostrum coats his tongue. The girl comes day after day. He grows to like her weight, a private shame he will tell no one. There is little he tells anyone, ever. He improves, improves, falls sick again. All the years of his childhood are like this, all the years of his adolescence. The slave girl dies in childbirth and he misses the taste of her. His mother and his sister sit with him and press their palms against his cheek and throat, coax bitterer tinctures down.

Some years later, Caesar comes to him one day and lays out his plans for another triumph. Some small hope beats against Octavian’s breast that Caesar should speak with him so frankly, and so much like a man. He has not been ill in many months, and he has begun to drill with a sword again the way that Titus Pullo taught him. 

_Let us go to your study,_ Caesar said to him. _There is business to discuss._ And then in Octavian’s rooms he had stood almost in deference, until Octavian bid him take a seat. Now he sits across from Octavian at his very writing-desk. The thrill Octavian feels is childish, but he allows himself to enjoy the gooseflesh it sends shooting along his arms, as though he has thrust his hands into frigid water. 

He has long studied Caesar’s body, ever since he knew to look at it as a body like his, one cursed by illness which fetters a boundlessly ranging mind. Octavian wishes he could name his curse. He wishes he could name Caesar’s, but he won’t break his word to Posca any more than he has already. 

“I have a proposition for you,” Caesar says. “Alongside the triumph I wish to host a theatrical festival. I thought to put you in charge of it.” 

“Oh.” 

“What do you think?” 

Octavian considers. “I do not care for theatre,” he says at last. “It’s uncouth, and not a productive use of time.” 

He has been to a fair few spectacles, of course; one must show one’s face sometimes in the name of political expediency. But given the choice he would conduct his business elsewhere. He has never been able to keep his brain to heel long enough to be entertained. 

Caesar snorts. “You need not care for theatre. You need only manage the proceedings. See to it the players have what they need, that they are where they need to be at the appointed times. Administration, you will find, is a skill that must be honed, and I dare say _that_ is a productive use of your time.” 

“Do you think I will be good at it?” 

“I think you could use the experience.” 

Octavian bites his lip. “That is not the same.” 

Caesar leans back in his chair and smooths a hand over the lustrous front of his toga. When he speaks his voice is low, and seems to reach across the desk to catch Octavian about the throat. “Consider that I have sought you out over any other,” he says.

Octavian does, at great length and long into the night.

* * *

The triumph coincides with a ghastly heat wave, such that every day Rome is swathed in a baking haze of sunlight by midmorning. The house is as an oven, and the slaves drag bedding into the peristyle so the family may sleep in the open air. On the first morning Octavian rises having scarcely slept at all, head swimming and drenched in sweat. 

“You mustn’t go,” says his mother at breakfast, holding a piece of ice to her temple. “You must rest here until nightfall. You have always wilted in the heat. You won’t be able to stand it.” 

Octavian gulps wine and water and tears a rind of bread into quarters. “I must go. Uncle expects me to be there.” 

“Then you must take a sack of ice with you. Put it down your front, like this.” She begins to bundle the ice in a cloth and reaches for him. 

He angles his body away. “Mother, I cannot go about with a sack of melting ice down my toga.” 

“Give him two. He’ll look like one of the actors playing a woman,” says Octavia. She pops a grape into her mouth. 

She suits the heat, his sister. Her dress is gauzy blue, her hair piled atop her head to bare her neck. She has grown more dissolute over these last years. On the whole Octavian thinks blame rather pointless, yet there remains a yelping voice inside him that will always call him culpable. He would be lying to say that night does not weigh on him. When he cannot sleep he dwells upon it. The memory is dreamlike, as though someone has wrapped it in the same cool, opaque blue as Octavia’s stola, in the cool of her hands against his febrile childhood, against their mother’s fire.

She steals a shard of ice from the pile their mother has gathered. As he watches she traces the soft circulus of her lips over and over again. Despite the suggestive nature of the action in this moment he finds her uncalculating, unseductive. Her guilelessness is soothing to him. When Octavian rises from the table, Octavia does not turn to watch him go. She stares into the middle distance. She opens her mouth and sets the ice upon her tongue.

* * *

By the end of the third day of the triumphal celebrations, there has been a run on ice throughout the city, and Octavian has begun to consider that perhaps his mother was right. He hates the theatre, and the actors, who are boisterous and vulgar. They do not know who he is, nor appreciate the magnitude of what he has organized so they might trip out on stage night after night and make fools of themselves. 

Caesar has saved a seat for Octavian by his side at every performance. Once his work is done Octavian goes to him and sits through the spectacle limned with tension, sure that Caesar is watching not only with an eye for his own entertainment but for Octavian’s managerial skills as well. At the end of each night he is exhausted, and it’s all he can do to wave off invitations to this or that party and collapse into a litter home to toss and turn on his pallet in the stifling courtyard. 

“Are you well, boy?” 

He is standing in the small tent raised for festival organisers. He has no recollection of how he got there, and now Mark Antony has appeared beside him in a nauseating cloud of perfume. 

“Mother isn’t here,” Octavian says automatically. 

Antony frowns at him. “I was sent to find you. The show’s about to start.” 

“Nonsense,” says Octavian. “It’s only midday.” 

Surely it was just a moment ago he was outside under the unrepentant sky, supervising the construction of a set. He must have come into the tent for shade, and indeed he feels quite cool now. Chilled, in fact. His skin is dry as kindling. 

Antony moves closer, staring at Octavian with some curiosity. “It’s long past midday. It is full night. Caesar has held the curtain for you.” 

He is scandalously dressed; the man has commissioned the flimsiest tunic possible, though given the weather one might mistake his sluttishness for prudence. He cocks his hip, rests a hand upon it. Octavian wants to tell him he looks like a woman, that he shames himself and Caesar and the Julii in one fell swoop. 

“Come with me now,” says Antony, narrowing his eyes. “It looks ill to have an empty seat next to Caesar. Every last parasite in the city is angling for it. If I don’t bring you back I shall have to take it, and I was rather hoping to duck out early.” 

He moves to touch Octavian, to take hold of his shoulder and guide him out of the tent and to his seat. At the touch of Antony’s hand ire sings through Octavian, not the first he has felt towards Antony and certainly not the last, but remarkable for its magnitude and acuity. “Get off,” he cries, and jerks himself backwards out of Antony’s grip. 

The rapid movement is a mistake. At once his vision swims. Antony’s garish costume blurs, and the tent is covered over with a creeping blackness that begins at the corners of Octavian’s vision and marches forth indomitably as a swarm of ants. Antony is speaking, though the sound carries strangely, as though both of them are under water. _You may go,_ Octavian wants to tell him. _Home to my mother, out to drown in wine and whores, back to Caesar’s side to pant like a lap dog. You may go and leave me here._ He is hot, then cold, then hot again. He longs for his bed like a child up too late. He wants the yellow room, and a warm mouthful of milk. 

Perhaps it is night after all. Perhaps Octavian will lie down just a moment. Then he will collect himself and go out of the tent, find Caesar, take his place in the crowd.

* * *

Voices swim up to him from a watery darkness.

“Oh, thank the gods. He wakes. He wakes, Atia.” 

“Oh, Bona Dea. You see? It is your presence that brought him ‘round.” 

Octavian cannot yet coax his eyes open, so he feels rather than sees his mother draw near him. “You must wake now,” she murmurs. “You have been abed so long we had to kill a bull for you. Your sister and I fair swam in blood. But enough of that--you’ve a visitor.” 

“I cannot--” 

“Shh, nonsense. You must see him. He has lived here since you took ill.” 

She rises from the edge of the couch. She slips from the room, perhaps lingers in the doorway to listen, but Octavian pays no further mind. For in her wake she has revealed this visitor. Caesar is bent double in a chair, elbows on his knees. He looks ill himself, skin green as old copper. For a moment Octavian simply looks at him. He is not quite awake. This must account for the peculiar surge he feels to see Caesar here. 

“How I worried for you,” Caesar says. 

“The--the triumph.” Octavian’s voice flutters out frail as a moth’s wing. Gods, but Caesar’s look frightens him. He looks near as bad as he did in the kitchen cupboard years ago, Posca groping for his tongue. 

Caesar’s face twists and crumples about the mouth. For a moment fear seizes Octavian--the curse--but then Caesar turns away and Octavian sees he is himself, though his eyes are wet and his cheeks tremble.

“The triumph is long since done. You have been abed for nearly a week. The doctors could not rouse you; tomorrow you were to be carried to the temple of Asclepius.” 

Octavian shudders. The temples are for those the doctors cannot cure. He has never been ill enough to be borne there, but he has always had a horror of it. He used to wake shouting from a particular nightmare: he is wrapped in waxed linen, cold on the temple floor. He has a coin wedged in the back of his throat.

“Ah, well,” he says roughly. “I woke, did I not?” 

“You did.” 

“I always wake eventually.” 

“You frightened your mother,” says Caesar. 

_You frightened me,_ he does not say. Octavian does not know whether he wishes Caesar would speak the words. Weakness has a strange allure in heroes; one thinks they desire to see it, but Octavian suspects imagining is better. He has seen Caesar’s weakness once already. He does not know how it would feel to see it again, to be the clasp at the gather of it. 

Sickness curls through him, closing his throat. Caesar does not miss it; he moves at once from the chair to retrieve a basin, and Octavian watches his own reflection in the dull bowl until the nausea passes and he is reassured he will not embarrass both of them. Even so, he has broken out in a cold sweat; his clothes cling to him, and he can feel his hair sticking to the skin of his forehead. 

“Lie back,” says Caesar, picking up a cloth. 

“Call a slave.” 

“You speak nonsense. You have run yourself ragged in my service. Who but I should attend you?” 

“Call your own slave, then.” 

“I would trust none with you but Posca, and he is a secretary, not a nursemaid. Lie back now.” 

Stunned into complicity, Octavian settles on the couch again. The damp fabric of his tunic feels heavy as armor and molded to him thus; he fears if he looks down he will see every stray bone, every convexity. Try as Pullo might, he is a stripling yet. Caesar seems to have no such fear; his eyes drift down Octavian’s body. Perhaps he is studying him the way Octavian once did Caesar. Perhaps he thinks he should have done so earlier, before entrusting the triumph to a sickly young man who has scarcely set aside the bulla before nearly dropping dead. 

“Who told you I was ill?” 

“Hmm?” 

“How did you hear of it?” If all Rome is talking of him, better to know now. 

“It was Antony,” says Caesar. “He sent a man himself to find me.” 

Octavian dislikes the thought of Antony at his bedside even more than that of Caesar, though for very different reasons. He shuts his eyes as though he could blot the thought out that way. He keeps them closed, and presently a certain stillness falls over the room. A heavy hand alights on the crown of his head, and Octavian nearly starts at the contact. He tries and fails to bite back the incipient gasp. 

“Shh,” is the response, though it is soft enough that it might have been a gust of wind. 

The heat has broken while he slept; drifting in from beyond the sickroom Octavian can smell rain. He doesn’t dare to open his eyes again. He simply lies and breathes and is grateful for it, as he is grateful for the rough thumb that runs along the ridge of his cheekbone. 

Caesar’s voice is so low Octavian does not know whether he is meant to hear it. “They told me you would die,” Caesar murmurs. “They told me to come quickly, and I made such haste I did not even put on my sandals.”

* * *

Back in the tent at Philippi, Octavian is drifting. He does not know whether he dreams or thinks, whether he wakes or sleeps. He can smell Caesar. Odd to remember this about him after everything: not his face, with all its planes and angles, which Octavian once dressed with blood. Not his words nor the robes he wore, not a general sense of grandeur or authority, but his scent, which Octavian had not even known he remembered. He smelled of beeswax and gum Arabic. Octavian shivers on the bed and he feels Caesar beside him, feels the slave girl, smells her sweat and soured milk. 

_Oh, my boy. How I worried for you when they told me you had taken ill._

“Get up,” says a voice. Then a clamor of voices all at once, screeching like crows, like bad augury. Get up, get up, get up. Hands worry at his back, pull at his toga, roust him from the bed. Someone is always rousing him. His mother will prise his mouth open to take his medicine. Caesar will shake him awake that he might prove he is not dead. 

“General Antony--” 

“Get him up, by the gods. He’s been hiding in this bloody tent for days.” 

“He is ill, sir.” Agrippa, voice tight with stress. He is grasping at Antony, who is grasping at Octavian. Antony will not allow himself to be manhandled, and removes Agrippa’s hands from him as though flicking away marauding insects. 

“Bugger ill,” Antony says. “We are at war, in case you hadn’t noticed. I would make my report.” 

“Peace,” croaks Octavian. He sits up in bed and waves a hand for water. Agrippa takes a cup from the slave and holds it to Octavian’s lips. Loyal Agrippa, whose hair sticks up at angles, matted with sweat from his helmet. To look at him Octavian feels something frighteningly akin to affection. 

“Here you are, sir,” says Agrippa. Behind him, Antony sneers. 

“I hear no sounds of battle,” says Octavian when his throat is moistened. 

“That is because the battle is over,” Antony says. “They found Cassius’ body yesterday. Brutus today, while you slept.” He does not look at Octavian. His fingers are knit together and he twists them over and over. 

“A suicide?” 

“Run through by spears,” says Antony. His tone is lilting and strange, sneer faded to a look of mild surprise. He speaks as if to himself. “I wouldn’t have thought--” 

Octavian does not let him finish. “Take me to the body,” he says. “I wish to see it.” 

Agrippa leaves the tent while Octavian’s slave dresses him, but Antony remains, glowering by the door and watching intently. He is filthy, caked in battlefield dust. A rime of dried blood crusts in the cup of his ear and continues down his cheek, but otherwise he appears uninjured save a particular hitch to his movements as he shifts from foot to foot. He would pace, perhaps, if there were room for it. 

“Why are you so uneasy? We have won.” 

Antony kicks at a clod of dirt. “Let’s get this over with.” 

Octavian does not think to ask how far they have to go until after they have set out. He does not recall the location of the enemy camp, does not recall if he ever knew it or if he has forgotten in the haze of sickness. Gum and sweat, milk and blood, a lurching nausea he must fight down. 

Antony does not look at Octavian. He gazes ahead at the horizon. The dust of battle has settled already, and the sky has filled with the dark, drifting shapes of buzzards. There are not so many corpses about, Octavian notes with some relief, though he knows that further afield they are strewn like rags, birds hunched over them, necks jerking as they rend flesh from bone. 

“I had him carried here,” Antony says, as though he knows what Octavian is thinking. 

Brutus’s body lies on a hillock, covered in a cloak of Tyrian purple. Antony has mounted a guard beside it, but he sends them away now with a wave of his hand. Once he does he stands a moment at the corpse’s head, staring at nothing. 

“Well,” he says at last. 

He drops into a squat on the ground and plucks the edge of the cloak between his fingers. He flips up the gilded hem to expose Brutus’s face, slack in death but largely untouched and eminently recognizable, though the flesh has begun to shrink from the skull beneath. His lips have crept back, exposing the rictus of his snarled front teeth. Octavian feels deeply pleased to see him. 

His mother had had nothing much to say for Servilia’s child. _Built like a stork and a stoic besides. I can think of nothing more boring._ But Octavian never found him so. Brutus had loved the republic with the blind, immalleable love of a child. He had been predictable, up until that day on the floor of the senate, but he had not been boring. 

“Remove the head,” Octavian says. 

“What?” 

“Decapitate him. We shall send it back before us on a stake.” 

“We’ll do no such thing,” says Antony. 

“We have bested them. I want it known.” 

“I’ll find you Cassius,” says Antony, still kneeling on the ground. “You may parade him to Gaul and back for all I care. Brutus is to have a proper funeral.” 

He covers the body over with the cloak again. Octavian does not miss the care with which he does so, arranging the material to fully conceal the figure beneath. 

“Nobody cares about Cassius. Both of us know that. They required a Brutus to slay Caesar, and we require one slain in kind.” 

“You have him.” 

“Slain publicly,” Octavian says. “If I cannot do it in the forum before the people, I will have the next best thing. Now call your men up here and have it done. I wish to decamp and return to Rome as soon as possible.” 

Antony gets to his feet and spits on the ground between them. “Call them yourself.” 

Octavian hasn’t got time for Antony’s misplaced sense of honor. He turns on his heel and calls for the guards, who are jawing biscuits at the bottom of the hill, helmets off and armor in disarray. When they see who has addressed them they stand frozen, and not even at attention. 

Octavian has just drawn breath to shout again--he will demand a sword, he thinks, he will remove the head himself--when Antony catches him about the arm. He tears free and turns away, but in the space of a half step Antony trips him up and plows into him from behind, sending Octavian toppling forward. 

He goes down against the earth, head pitched down the slope of the hillock. A well-placed knee to the back chases the air from his lungs. Thus winded he cannot speak, but he opens his mouth anyway as though in reflexive protest. Antony moves astride him and wriggles into the small of Octavian’s back as though mounting a horse. He plants a palm on the upturned side of Octavian’s face and grinds his mandible into the dirt. 

“Perhaps the soil here has some curative properties. I ought to have done this before the battle. Then you might have gotten off your arse.” 

Octavian bucks and spits. Antony lifts his hand just slightly, but it is only to drape his forearm heavily over the back of Octavian’s neck. The pressure sounds an alarm somewhere in the animal depths of his brain, and Octavian scrabbles against the ground in involuntary panic. He nearly manages enough leverage to prop himself up on one elbow. The sliver of space is enough to manage lungsful of air and the luxury of a retort. 

“I am no boy, Antony. Whatever you do now you do to a man, and to your--your peer.” 

Antony laughs. “My _peer_. Woe that your mother pulled me off you once, boy.” He leans down closer, the whole of his torso pressed to Octavian’s back. His breath tickles Octavian’s earlobe. “She will not do so again.” 

“Those men serve me too now.” 

“Do they? Were they going to follow your orders? I think they would stand idly by and watch me crush the life out of you.” 

Antony grunts and shifts his weight, pressing Octavian’s ribs against the ground again, forcing a groan out of his mouth. Octavian can feel the pulse beat in his wrists, his groin. His cock twitches, though there is no space for it against the hard ground. Antony laughs again and posts as though he is on horseback. He is given to a certain dark joy when it comes to his enemies, and Octavian is not nearly stupid enough not to know that that is what they are to one another. 

Octavian does not know what happened that day on the floor of his bedroom. He remembered thinking with blinding clarity that he was going to die, and that Antony was going to kill him. He wondered, as Antony’s hands tightened around his throat and consciousness began to drain away, if his mother would forsake Antony afterwards. He had come to the conclusion she would not. The realization, like his encroaching death, had not provoked any particular emotion. Distantly, he heard his mother shout at Antony. How strange, he thought, that he should die like this. How strange that he should live--and when Antony let him go and he had slumped to the floor it was that strangeness that surged through him, a trial of vessels that filled his cock with blood and asked it, am I yet alive? 

And if he wants it back sometimes, that feeling, is it really so strange? If he feels it now, dirt between his teeth, lying prone beneath Antony beside the flyblown corpse of their enemy? 

Gods, but Antony must know it. 

He will not writhe beneath Antony. The worst of it is that he does not need to. It’s pain and struggle that incenses him, the pressure, the inchoate rage at being held fast. Even a woman may do it to him, if she is the right woman, if she is strong enough, if she speaks sharply. 

“Let me up,” he says. 

“I will let you up when you throw me off of you. Barring that, when you agree to let the body alone.”

“Brutus is dead. Do you not think he would parade us before the plebs? Before the senate? Gods--” For Antony has lain a heavy arm across his neck again, and Octavian can make no sound save a series of gurgles. 

“You, perhaps. Not I.” 

Octavian coughs. “Perhaps it reassures you to think so.” 

By way of answer Antony levers up and off him for the space of a breath, of two. Then down he comes again with a force so crushing Octavian will be bruised about the ribs tomorrow. His head has begun to pound and his cock has not stopped, but his annoyance at Antony robs the pleasure of its edge. He would rather grapple wordlessly than lie here and banter. He would rather the guards were not watching, yet they loiter just as Antony predicted. It would seem that again Octavian’s life is in Antony’s hands. 

They lie flattened, spine to sternum. Antony’s sweat drips onto his face. His scalp wound has come open again. There is blood and the warmth of the plain, and the press of the ground, and the reek of rot that might be Brutus. Octavian works his mouth like a fish. His pinned lungs ache to be filled. A hot weight settles in his pelvis. 

“You were a sickly youth,” says Antony into his ear, coating it with spittle, setting Octavian’s teeth on edge. “When a child is afflicted thus I often think it’s better to die young. Spares everyone a lot of ugliness.” 

Octavian cannot see the body atop him, but when he drives his head backwards into Antony’s face he knows his aim is true, for his whole skull seems to rattle with the impact. He feels a burst of pain. Antony gives a wet curse. He rolls onto his side and drags Octavian with him, elbow at his throat like a shepherd’s crook. He gropes at Octavian’s crotch with his free hand and crows at what he finds there. Octavian thrashes, but Antony holds fast. Octavian has bloodied his nose; he can hear it bubbling when Antony breathes. 

Antony’s grip tightens. He is a great snake, Octavian his struggling quarry. He has an illness, certainly. His vision narrows to a white-hot, asphyxiant pinprick, and in this moment he is helpless as Caesar convulsing in the pantry. He is sitting vigil at a bedside. He is weak, and he might promise anything. 

Afterwards they fall apart like stale bread. Antony leers and makes a show of wiping his hand. The guards return to their dice, Octavian to his tent. Later they will build a pyre for a funeral, and Octavian will burn all the way back to Rome. 


End file.
